i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

92 / Neel’s Social Realist Artthat during the Cold War years, when women were pressured to return to thehome, America became a child-centered society. According to the sociologistElaine Tyler May, mothers were now informed that they were “the architectsof peace,” and that “The new philosophy of child guidance makes of parenthoodnot a dull, monotonous routine job, but an absorbing creative profession.”1 May’s Homeward Bound argues that “The powerful political consensusthat supported cold war policies abroad and anticommunism at home fueledconformity to the suburban family ideal.” 2 One indicator of the importance ofthe child in the postwar family was the custom of commissioning their portraits,which would then adorn the living room wall. Whether paintings orphotographs, these images confronted children with their idealized selves asthe focus of their world. The children Neel painted, on the other hand, did notcome from homes where their own faces were likely to occupy the center ofthe family space. In convincing the children of Spanish Harlem to participatein this ritual, Neel temporarily erased class differences.During the 1940s and 1950s, when the middle class migrated to the suburbs,Neel painted what the sociologist Michael Harrington would call in1962 “The Other America,” “an America of poverty . . . hidden today in a waythat it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to us...” 3 Ten yearsearlier, the publication of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man had articulatedthe effect of that social invisibility on the “emotional experience” of nonwhites.As he wrote in the ƒrst and last paragraphs of his Prologue:I am an invisible man . . . I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse tosee me . . . When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, orƒgments of their imagination—indeed, everything or anything except me . . . I amone of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility;any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, andwhy should I be, when you refuse to see me? Responsibility rests upon recognition,and recognition is a form of agreement. 4Both sociologist and novelist isolate the key strategy by which inequitableclass relations are maintained: a willed social myopia. Neel’s Spanish Harlemproject achieves a pictorial recognition between classes by having her sittersaddress her—that is, address the whiteness that was equally invisible becausenormative.East Harlem, the area between Fifth Avenue and the East River, which,bounded by 125th and 96th streets on the north and south, was at the turn ofthe century an ethnic slum housing a populace mostly of Russian Jewish, Italian,and Irish origin. After World War I, Puerto Ricans, as well as smaller groupsof Cubans and Dominicans, moved into the area in large numbers, providing